MAIMONIDES AND MEDITERRANEAN CULTURE 3
Mediterranean CulturesThe historical refl ection on the cultural role of the Mediterranean, as a
unifying principle of culture, began already with Henri Pirenne’s ground-
breakingMohammed and Charlemagne.^6 Shortly thereafter Fernand
Braudel, in his pioneering work on the Mediterranean world in the time
of Philip II, argued that only a comprehensive approach that treats the
Mediterranean as a single unit can enable the historian to understand lo-
cal developments properly and to evaluate correctly their ramifi cations
and implications.^7 Around the same time that Braudel’s book appeared,
Shlomo Dov Goitein was working on his magnum opus, the multivolume
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as
Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza.^8 Like Braudel, Goitein
believed that our sources require that we constantly bear in mind the
close interconnections and interdependence of the various parts of the
Mediterranean. The fragments of the Cairo Geniza— the hoard of manu-
scripts discovered at the end of the nineteenth century in the Ben Ezra
synagogue in Cairo— refl ected, like so many snapshots, the life of the
Jewish community in Cairo from the tenth century up to modern times.^9
Goitein skillfully brought these snapshots to life, reconstructing the web
of economic alliances across the Mediterranean and beyond it, the po liti-
cal and personal ties between the individual writers, and their religious
and cultural concerns.
Although Braudel and Goitein did not belong to the same circle of
historians, for a half- century following them “Mediterraneanism” be-
came very much in vogue. References to the Mediterranean appeared in
titles of many works, and provided a conceptual frame for others.^10 The
see chap. 2, note 3, below. Compare, for example, Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life
and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York, 2008), 14– 15. Kraemer’s
overall approach in this matter is very similar to the one proposed in the present book.
(^6) H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Bruxelles, 1922).
(^7) F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris,
1949); [=idem,The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
trans. S. Reynolds (New York, 1976)].
(^8) S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: the Jewish Communities of the Arab World as
Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley, 1967), 6 v. According to Goitein’s
own testimony (5:497), he began his work in dependently of Braudel and read the latter’s
work only when he was already writing the last volumes of his own.
(^9) See Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: the History of Cambridge Univer-
sity’s Genizah Collection (Richmond and Surrey, 2000); ibid., The Cambridge Genizah
Collections: Their Contents and Signifi cance (Cambridge, 2002).
(^10) See, by way of an example, M. J. Chiat and K. L. Reyerson, eds., The Medieval Mediter-
ranean: Cross- Cultural Contacts (St. Cloud, Minn., 1988); R. Arnzen and J. Thielmann,
eds.,Words, Texts and Concepts Cruising the Mediterranean Sea: Studies on the Sources,